Many organizations and government institutions are requiring the reporting of financial data using an electronic format. One format that has become increasingly popular among these organizations and government institutions is eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). To create a XBRL document for submission to an organization, a business must match an XBRL taxonomy with the source data, then generate the required output document from the source data and the taxonomy. The taxonomy is a definition of the information and relationships between the information needed in the required output. To create the required output, the business matches XBRL tags in the taxonomy with information in the business' accounting or other financial data. Upon matching the tags with the financial data, an XBRL document can be created with the financial information
Unfortunately, the process of matching the XBRL tags with financial information is difficult. Generally, businesses must complete the process by assigning manually the XBRL tag to a portion of financial data in some rudimentary way, typically in a software program that may or may not have been designed for this purpose, for example, a spreadsheet program. In more difficult situations, the business user must manipulate the XBRL documents themselves to create the appropriate match, which is a time consuming and tedious process because XBRL documents were designed to be processed by computers and not manually edited.
The process of matching the XBRL tags becomes extremely difficult if there are numerous XBRL tags and many different portions of financial data that require review. Further, the process is more complicated when the business user must complete the process over and over for each subsequent reporting of the financial data, for example, for reporting each month the balance sheet report. The reporting of the XBRL documents becomes prohibitively difficult as the number of data items and frequency of reporting increases. As more and more entities mandate the use of these machine-readable formats, such as XBRL, for financial reporting, software will have to increasingly perform these operations for the user.